Non-human contributions to personality neuroscience: From fish through primates – a concluding editorial overview

AbstractThis special issue attempts to integrate personality, psychopathology, and neuroscience as means to improve understanding of specific traits and trait structures in humans. The key strategy is to dive into comparative research using a range of species to provide simple models. This strategy has, as its foundation, the fact that the most basic functions, and their supporting neural systems, are highly conserved in evolution. The papers collected in the issue show that, from fish, through rats, to primates, the homologies in brain systems and underlying functions (despite species-specific forms of expression) allow simpler cases to provide insights into the neurobiology behind more complex ones including human. Our introductory editorial paper to this special issue took a bottom-up approach, starting with the genetics of conserved brain systems and working up to cognition. Here, we deconstruct the different aspects of personality, progressing from more complex ones in primates to least complex in fish. With the primate section, we summarize papers that discuss the factors that contribute to sociability in primates and how they apply to healthy and pathological human personali